Raven with the heart of a Lion: O.J. Brigance

Mike Beamish, Vancouver Sun01.25.2013

Baltimore Ravens director of player development O.J. Brigance, a former B.C. Lions star in the early 1990s. Brigance is afflicted with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and is now wheelchair bound.Baltimore Sun photo
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Baltimore Ravens’ O.J. Brigance was given a game ball by Ed Reed (not pictured) during a celebration at the conclusion of the AFC Championship Game at Gillette Stadium on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013, in Foxboro, Mass. The Baltimore Ravens defeated the New England Patriots, 28-13.

O.J. Brigance, the Baltimore Ravens’ Super Bowl champion, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2007. The Baltimore director of player development and his wife Chanda have established the Brigance Brigade to raise funds to improve the quality of life of ALS patients and their families.

O.J. Brigance works out at B.C. Lions training camp in 1993. He’s one of handful of players with both Grey Cup and Super Bowl rings.Colin Price
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Shirly and Phil Hewlett of Delta join O.J. Brigance at the 2009 Two Rings for O.J. fundraiser in support of the Brigance Brigade Foundation in Baltimore.

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Despite the loss of human articulation to the ravages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, former B.C. Lion O.J. Brigance won’t be silenced.

He remains a powerful speaker and advocate for research into the disease that has robbed the former Lion, Baltimore Stallion and Baltimore Raven of both speech and body movement.

You may have seen him, the Ravens’ wheelchair-bound director of player development in a wheelchair on the NFL broadcast last Sunday, when Brigance presented the Lamar Hunt Trophy to his team, following the Ravens’ 28-13 win over the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship Game.

Brigance is able to converse through a high-tech device called a DynaVox, which allows his thoughts to be heard by focusing on a computer screen and blinking to form words and sentences. The response time takes a while, but the wait is worth it.

His message is one of fortitude, resilience and inspiration.

“It’s rare that you see somebody so strong and so determined and so motivated, every single day,” Ravens linebacker, Brendon Ayanbadejo, another ex-B.C. Lion, told The Vancouver Sun. “He can’t move a single finger, walk, brush his teeth, or speak to us in a normal voice. It’s a contradiction of sorts. He is extremely limited, but he’s so powerful. His attitude, his motivation, his inner strength — we see it every day at practice, or at our training facility. Our jobs are easy. Our lives are easy. Nobody makes us appreciate what we have better than O.J.”

Because of his physical impairment, Brigance and his wife, Chanda, will be taking Amtrak to New Orleans late next week as the Ravens attempt to defy the odds and win the franchise’s second championship, in Super Bowl XLVII against the favoured San Francisco 49ers.

The Lions, following up a suggestion by Bob Marjanovich, a Team 1040 radio personality, are turning Marjanovich into a special emissary during Super Bowl week. He’ll present a No. 57 Lions jersey, and a letter of encouragement from GM Wally Buono, to Brigance who wore that numeral when he played in B.C. from 1991-93. He was twice a CFL West Division all-star.

Although Buono admits to having only a passing acquaintance with Brigance, who was stricken with ALS in 2007, the cause is close to his heart. He was a Montreal Alouette teammate of Tony Proudfoot, an innovator (Proudfoot came up with the idea of putting staples in shoes to gain better traction in the 1977 Grey Cup “Ice Bowl”), educator (Montreal’s Dawson College), broadcaster and hero.

Proudfoot ran, heedless of his own safety, to attend to a wounded student during a shooting rampage in 2006 at Dawson College. A year later, he was struck by ALS, the same invariably fatal neurological disease in which the nerve cells that control movement progressively degenerate, leading to paralysis and death from respiratory failure.

Proudfoot died in December, 2010. Like Brigance, his same strong, determined and brave approach to the bad hand he was dealt, and his advocacy for ALS research, touched the Alouettes and thousands of ordinary Canadians to the core.

To honour Proudfoot, Buono has become a spokesman for the ALS Society of B.C. and takes part in their annual fundraising walk.

“I know more about it because, by being involved, I’ve learned how cruel and tough a disease it is — seeing Tony regress,” Buono said. “My thought was, Tony had the courage to bring attention to all this, and fight for it. The least I can do is lend my name to the cause. The jersey and the note are just an acknowledgment to O.J. that we support him in his fight, too.”

For Phil and Shirly Hewlett of Delta, B.C., the TV images of Brigance are saddening and inspiring. The couple’s relationship with the former CFL and NFL player goes back to 1991, when Brigance came to B.C. as a homesick rookie from Rice University in Houston, his hometown.

Longtime Lions season ticket holders and devoted church goers, the Hewletts were directed to Brigance by medical trainer Bill Reichelt, who is still with the team, when they sought out a faith-based speaker for a banquet at their place of worship, Peace Portal Alliance.

“Danny Barrett (then the Lions quarterback) was unavailable, so Bill put us in touch with O.J. ‘He does that kind of thing,’ ” Phil Hewlett explained. “Really. O.J. had just left Rice, he was a long way from home, and he was missing it. We told him, if he needed a place to get a home-cooked meal, or simply a place to put up his feet in a family setting, our door was always open.”

Brigance took them at their word. Phil is immensely proud of his wife’s cooking and, apparently, O.J. was proof of that.

He came over on an almost weekly basis for down-home meals of roast beef, salmon and chicken, finished off by peach cobbler, a traditional southern dessert.

“He’d call us his ‘white mom and dad,’ ” Phil said. “He had a sister about the same age as our daughter, Coralee. When many of the black guys found out about Shirly’s peach cobbler, they wanted in to. They said they couldn’t believe a white girl could make peach cobbler like that.”

Indeed, when Lion imports needed a place to stay in their search for apartments, or accommodation after a lease ran out, the Hewletts’ home served as a way station, soup kitchen and bunkhouse. Among the long-term visitors were Damon and Desiree Allen, Kent and Shelley Austin, Khari and Justine Jones.

Brigance’s best year with the Lions was 1993, when head coach Dave Ritchie moved him to outside linebacker and he thrived under Ritchie’s aggressive team defence. He had 20 sacks, and GM Eric Tillman believed he would be a bedrock player for the team for many years ahead.

“He was quick, explosive, intelligent,” recalls Jamie Taras, Brigance’s teammate and now the Lions’ director of community relations. “What I remember most is O.J.’s tremendous spirit — outgoing, friendly, engaging, a lot of positive energy. He was a special guy, and special to be around. I think you’re seeing that come out now by what he’s going through.”

Though Tillman did everything in his power to keep him, Canadian dollars couldn’t compete against the Yankee greenback back then. Brigance left for Baltimore, during the CFL’s initially heady, but ultimately ill-fated expansion into the U.S. Lower taxes, the currency difference and the exciting return of pro football to Baltimore, a city betrayed after the beloved Colts were packed off to Indianapolis in 1984 under the cover of darkness, seduced him into signing with the CFL Stallions.

Though they were faithful Lions season ticket holders, the Hewletts commiserated with Brigance at BC Place Stadium, after the Lions defeated the Stallions 26-23 on Lui Passaglia’s last-play field goal in the ’94 championship, the first Canada-U.S. Grey Cup game.

“We were some of the first people he talked to,” Phil said. “He gave us a big hug. ‘It hurts’, he told us. But I recall vividly how gracious he was even after that crushing defeat.”

Brigance did pick up a Grey Cup ring the following season when the Stallions defeated Buono’s Calgary Stampeders in Regina, playing for a team coached by Don Matthews and quarterbacked by Tracy Ham.

In 1996, Brigance finally got his NFL shot, after Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell announced he was moving his team to Baltimore and the CFL’s venture into Maryland was doomed.

After reaching out to 28 other teams, which expressed no interest in him, Brigance finally got a nibble from the Miami Dolphins, who took the bait and signed the free agent. He was twice voted team captain and named recipient of the Ed Block Courage Award by his Miami teammates in 1999.

A year later, Brigance jumped to the Ravens, became a key contributor on special teams, and picked up a Super Bowl ring.

Only a handful of players have a matching set of Grey Cup and Super Bowl jewelry. Brigance is one of them. But he remains the only player to have won CFL and NFL championships, representing the same city.

Even after he left Vancouver, Brigance never forgot the Hewletts. When the Dolphins made a rare visit to the Northwest to play the Seahawks, he arranged to have tickets waiting for them in Seattle.

Phil and Shirly’s last visit with O.J. came in October 2009, when they were invited to Baltimore for his 40th birthday party — the Two Rings for O.J. fundraiser, run by the Brigance Brigade, his foundation which supports research and individuals and families dealing with ALS. Matthews, Ham and Chris Armstrong, another prominent member of the ’95 Stallions, and the team’s owner Jim Speros, were also at M&T Bank Stadium for the affair. (Speros tweaked the NFL by initially deciding to call Baltimore’s CFL team the Colts, before a lawsuit squelched that idea).

“He was still the same old O.J.,” said Phil. “He was very, very thin and in a wheelchair. He could still talk then, but his voice was barely above a whisper. It was tough to see.”

The normal life expectancy for someone with the progressive disease averages from two to five years. It’s a frightening, unimaginable prognosis, but it’s news that somehow has been more daunting to others than Brigance, who refuses to retreat into self-pity. He puts in a normal eight-hour work day, from Monday to Thursday, and still has time left over for TV interviews. Both Fox Sports and CBS were in his office earlier this week, and the media fascination with his human drama in ongoing, says Christine Kirkley, executive director of the Brigance Brigade Foundation.

“It’s never ending — because it’s such an inspiring story,” she told The Vancouver Sun. “O.J. is 100 per cent part of the Ravens’ Super Bowl story. He’s in the spotlight, and he’s using it to raise awareness of the disease. But the wonderful thing is what he’s doing for the whole ALS community. There are many others out there who don’t have the platform he does, but their stories are just as inspiring. When people see him on TV, or the Internet, they see hope.

“ALS is the forgotten disease. But, because of O.J., people are paying attention. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

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